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 Part 3: Hey, big spenders
Part
1: River of controversy
Part
2: The challenge of China
PHNOM PENH - Over
the past 40 years, US$1 billion has been poured into the
murky Mekong River, covering environmental reports,
scores of proposed infrastructure plans and countless
fishery management studies. Some Mekong observers say
that if you took all the reports and their pages and
dumped them into the river, they would easily choke its
flow.
Keo Mohamat, 60, lives along the Mekong in
the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, in an extremely
weathered and leaky seven-meter pirogue (wooden fishing
boat). Keo has never seen any of that money flowing into
the river, nor read any of these expensively produced
reports. His family, including seven children, still
lives on less than a dollar a day from the fish caught
and sold near the market.
 "Before, I used to
catch a lot of fish with my bare hands, but things have
changed now. There's less fish than ever before and the
river just seems to be changing," says Mohamat, a
slightly built chamese (Muslim Cambodian)
fisherman.
The second Indochina War ended in
April 1975 and Thais, Laotians, Cambodians and
Vietnamese found themselves under the same roof, living
by the banks of the same river, the Mekong, that has
coursed through their nations, binding them together as
brothers and sisters in times of war and peace.
By 1975, hardened by its defeat in the Vietnam
War, the United States abandoned not only Vietnam but
Laos and Cambodia, a policy maintained by the
administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald
Reagan and fully supported by Congress or, at times,
compelled by it. This was institutionalized when
Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Appropriations
Act of 1976, which in effect prevented any direct aid to
these three countries.
"The Mekong River
Commission's origins date back to 1957 when the
Committee for Coordination of Investigation of the Lower
Basin (the Mekong Committee) was established to ensure
the full and equitable use of the Mekong resources,"
said Khy Tainglim, Cambodia's minister of public works
and chairman of the MRC.
It was in April 1965 in
a speech presented by US president Lyndon B Johnson at
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that the United
States made its dramatic offer to finance the Mekong
Project at a reputed cost of $1 billion. This speech and
its subsequent impact, followed by a spate of
international media coverage, was interrupted by the
course of US military commitments to the escalating
conflict in Vietnam. And although it did not deflect the
course of the war, the proposed Mekong Project left an
imprint on Southeast Asia.
The United States was
unable to keep its promise to Cambodia and other
countries along the river. Johnson's vision was an
idealized attempt to demonstrate that the US was capable
of constructive actions, not dissimilar to the
nation-building process in Afghanistan today. In many
ways, LBJ's grandiose plans for the Mekong, an Asian
version of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) project,
appealed to this Texas river man. He desperately wanted
the Mekong to flow as a river of peace just when US
anti-war groups were feverishly marching on Washington
demanding an end to the Vietnam War.
While the
Mekong projects conceived during the war in the 1960s
and 1970s were multi-purpose, aimed at the production of
electricity, irrigation, flood control and navigation,
the revised reports and directives of the 1990s almost
exclusively emphasized hydropower production to be
marketed to Thailand. At the time, Thailand was the only
nation advanced enough to require the power produced by
these future dams and close enough to receive it.
According to the World Commission on Dams,
large-scale dams constructed over the past 50 years
amount to a $42 billion industry. With more than 45,000
large dams in the world, one-third of all countries rely
on some form of hydropower for more than half their
electricity supply, and large dams generate half of
electricity overall. But clearly the past 40 years has
witnessed a more critical assessment of the social and
environmental impact of large dams. The harnessing of
water does fragment and transform river systems. Some
global estimates suggest that 40 million to 80 million
people have been displaced from their traditional
villages by reservoirs alone.
China's Great
Gorges Dam Project on the Yangtze is considered one of
the largest infrastructure projects ever conceived at at
cost approaching $30 billion and climbing each day. Upon
completion, the dam will displace millions of poor
farmers.
From 1994 to 2001, the Mekong River
Commission's annual reports reflect a total donor
contribution of almost $80 million. Denmark has been one
of the leading MRC donors, pledging $13,294,062 between
1994 and 1998. The Danes have historically spent almost
1 percent of their annual gross national product (GNP)
on overseas direct assistance (ODA), amounting to almost
$1.8 billion.
Denmark's funding in Cambodia
directed toward the MRC flows through a program called
Danish International Development Assistance (DANIDA). It
is the Danish equivalent to the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID).
Given this
interest in the MRC, is no coincidence that one of
Denmark's leading engineering consulting companies,
COWI, with more than 2,000 employees, has been engaged
in numerous lucrative Southeast Asian environmental and
engineering consultancy projects. Michael Davidsen,
COWI's Washington representative, says he is always
"looking for opportunities and the World Bank and IFC
[International Finance Corp] still focus on
capacity-building in Southeast Asia".
COWI has
recently won a major multi-disciplinary project in
Vietnam and another in Laos.
"One of COWI's
strengths is its multi-disciplinary assets, along with
the ability to design and implement multi-disciplinary
solutions. This is probably the most important single
factor in our being selected to undertake these
projects," says COWI project chief Jacob Ulrich.
As part of the Danish government's commitment to
Cambodia's development, the Danish consultancy firm Carl
Bro has also recently received a contract to strengthen
the capacity of four natural-resource ministries,
including the Ministry of Environment (MoE), to improve
coordination of environmental activities and screen
natural resources and environment support projects.
Japan, also a significant donor to the Mekong
subregion, has shifted its money diplomacy from big
projects such as hydropower since its official
development aid has shrunk by 10 percent. A Japanese
official said the government's ODA office is putting
more emphasis on global issues and environmental
protection.
The World Bank has recently approved
a Global Environment Facility grant of $11 million to
support the MRC's promotion and improvement of
sustainable water management in the Mekong River Basin,
as well as protection of the environment, aquatic life
and the ecological balance of the region.
Additionally, the Asian Development Bank (ADB)
has poured $40 million in assistance and $460 million in
loans into the Greater Mekong Subregion for
infrastructure projects aimed at facilitating trade.
All these figures are very removed from the
Mekong Delta inhabitants, who are mostly farmers and
fishermen. They have survived natural floods, not for
merely a decade or a century, but for thousands of years
without any dams or water-diversion projects. Their
livelihoods have depended totally on the river, and the
annual flood-drought cycle for the entire history of
their existence. Below the Khone Falls are the Tonle Sap
Lake and the Delta, a distinctly flat region commonly
referred to as the Mekong Plain.
The Tonle Sap
is the largest freshwater lake of Southeast Asia,
covering 27,000 hectares during the dry season and
150,000 hectares during the rainy season. The Tonle Sap
River reverses its flow seasonally and acts as a
reservoir to regulate the flow of the Mekong. Fish
migrations from the Tonle Sap into the Mekong River help
restock fisheries as far upstream as Yunnan province in
China.
The Cambodian Tourism Ministry fears that
the country's power-hungry neighbors upriver may damage
the Mekong since it is the ideal river system for
eco-tourism. Cambodia saw tourist numbers up 25 percent
in 2000 and in 2001 Siem Reap had more than 470,000
visitors. The river is the passageway to Angkor Wat,
which is a compelling reason for an environmentally
sound water-management program.
Phnom Penh's
charismatic and powerful Governor Chea Sophara has
joined the ranks of senior officials concerned about
protecting the river system from pollution. "Keeping the
river clean for the people is a top priority," he said.
The ADB in 1998 came under heavy external
pressure from various environmental groups and was
forced to establish its own special commission to
examine the negative environmental impact of the Theun
Hinboun dam constructed in Central Laos. This dam, owned
by two of the world's largest power utilities, Statkraft
of Norway and Vattenfall of Sweden (Nordic Hydropower),
as well as the Lao utility and Thai developers, has
systematically taken water and land away from people
without their consent, and has caused damage to the
fishery.
No one disputes the amount of dollars
committed to the Mekong River Commission. But now many
Mekong watchers are asking who is really controlling the
pace and schedule of the Mekong's development.
On the face of it, the directors of the
commission include many who are deeply concerned about
the future of the water system and wish to include China
as a contributing member. The voices not heard are those
of the hundreds of thousands of villagers and fishermen
whose lives depend each day on what they catch and how
the silt replenishes their soil.
It is
noteworthy that the people along the Mekong have
historically practiced their own home-grown fishery
conservation. Most of these poor fishermen can be seen
on their small wooden boats with bamboo traps
camouflaged with leaves slowly gliding upriver to their
prized fishing spots. There they catch only the small
fish they can eat and never overfish the deep
forest-shaded pools where the fish breed.
"Hydropower from the river system should be
viewed as an opportunity, but what is now more seriously
considered is the impact," said Joern Christensen, the
chief executive of the MRC.
The MRC knows that
Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam all have one common
goal, which is economic growth, but each is at its own
stage of development, with its own form of dependency on
the Mekong's resources. This geopolitical situation now
must factor in China. The dams will continue to be built
and there is no turning back the forces of development.
"Concentration on major infrastructure
developments and their shortcomings carries with it the
risk of overlooking the fundamental social and political
problems of the countries within the Mekong Basin,"
writes Milton Osborne in his book, The Mekong.
The river itself remains a delicate ecosystem,
challenged each day by development and urbanization, a
place where more than 50 million lives and countless
river and floodplain marine lives dwell, not always in
perfect harmony with their neighbors, but always in
rhythm with the river.
The Mekong is alive with
activity - barges overflowing with goods, ferries
transporting villagers from one bank to the other, women
along the river's edge washing their clothes, children
swimming, old women in straw hats each day displaying
their farm products on the floating markets and newborn
babies asleep on the gently swaying fishing boats.
Although it may seem to be an article of faith
that building a nation means creating a Western-style
democracy, the dark shadows of the past linger long over
Cambodia. While many Cambodians voted enthusiastically
for the promises of their local candidates several
months ago in commune or rural elections, it is still
not clear what the newly elected councils will actually
be empowered to do. Decentralization has become a
fashionable political reform around the world, and
Cambodia's efforts to move power and authority to the
local level make it one of the latest countries to join
the movement.
Until there are village meetings
for these poor fishermen to voice their stories and
concerns, the river must be their messenger. The river
speaks to fishermen like Sok Lim and Meas Eng, every day
of the past and of the future, of the eternally
recurring cycles of nature, of survival, of those
mysterious floating currents of life that break your
heart at every river bend.
Next week: Reform in the forests
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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